Alien Hunter: Underworld (6 page)

HE TURNED
on his cell phone. The moment it went online, it rang.

“You killed them all,” Diana said.

“How would you know that?”

“Flynn, I have to tell you, Aeon is really, really pissed off.”

“Okay.”

“They want you stopped once and for all.”

“Say again?”

“They are
demanding
this, Flynn, and we're not sure exactly what they mean. They might want you killed in return.”

“You tell them that we lost twenty-eight living human beings to their seven damn robots or whatever they are, and if they want us to capture these creatures, either send us instructions or send us help.”

“Flynn?”

He heard tears in her voice, which concentrated his attention. “Are they coming after me?”

Silence.

“Hey, this is me, Diana. Am I in trouble, here?”

“I don't know.”

He controlled it. “Look, I've got the bodies in the trunk of my car.”

“What happened to the civilian?”

“They're fine.”

“They?”

“The wife has a lover. The sheriff. Look, there's a lot going on here. We're dealing with a whole new level of mind control, for one thing. I've seen things—oh, Christ, Diana, I'm telling you—”

“I want you off the roads. They could grab you.”

“What do I do with these bodies? I can't just leave them in a Dumpster.”

“Okay, get them to Wright-Pat. Get rid of them. Then come back here, Flynn. Stay close to home.”

He wasn't sure he was going to do that. In fact, he had no idea what he was going to do, but he was certainly going to get rid of these bodies. He considered flying them to the containment, but thought better of it. He had no idea if he was more vulnerable in the air or on the ground, but he had absolutely no hope of escape in a plane, so he decided to stay on the highway.

Even so, he had never felt more exposed in his life. He'd never been scared like this. He was used to feeling invulnerable, and now he felt anything but. Why in hell would Aeon care so much about these damn things? They were machines made of flesh and blood, nothing more, so why be so concerned about them?

Perhaps Aeon's intentions were being misinterpreted. Maybe they were on the right side of this thing after all. Our knowledge of their language was flawed at best.

He gripped the wheel, pushing the car as fast as he dared to go. He sure as hell didn't want some state cop looking in that trunk.

As he drove, he found himself compulsively tonguing the cyanide capsule. He'd planned on following his usual routine and returning it to its container, but not now, no way.

He just could not believe that Aeon was angry. If they wanted contact to develop, they should be elated. Not only that, why should he be afraid of them? They had no major presence here. No ships, no personnel. Or did they?

Diana and her team were panicking. They were confused. Had to be.

He drove on, the lights of his car reflecting back more and more fog, making it so hard to see that he gripped the steering wheel and peered ahead, but he never let the speedometer dip below seventy.

The fog was dangerous, the night was dangerous, being alone on the highway was dangerous. Worse, he was no longer even close to understanding what he was dealing with, and that was very dangerous.

About an hour out of Mountainville, the state highway met the interstate. He had to stop for gas, so he also got coffee. The attendant was an Indian man behind bulletproof plastic. He took Flynn's money and handed out his change, his eyes glazed with sleepy boredom.

The coffee was old but it was strong, and he drank it methodically as he continued on down the highway.

He covered the distance to Dayton in just over five hours. It was pushing ten in the morning when he reached Wright-Pat. He was hungry and close to exhaustion, but there was no stopping until these bodies were safely burned.

He pulled into the first guard post and flashed his badge.

Nothing happened.

The guard leaned into the car. “Sir, are you okay?”

“No, I'm not okay, but I have a legitimate ID, so please let me through.”

“Would you like an escort to the base hospital, sir?”

“Open the gate, please.”

Flynn took back his secure ID. It didn't appear any different from any other USGS Identification Card. On the surface. As it was run through readers in ever-more-secure areas, though, it would grant deeper and deeper access, into places that not even presidents knew about.

The gate went up and Flynn drove through. Wright-Pat was a big base, the U.S. Air Force's largest repair and refitting facility, among other things. Among those “other things” was the Air Force Materiel Command, which controlled the warehouse where he was headed.

It was a low building no different from dozens of others on the base. Thousands of people passed it every day without realizing that, two hundred feet beneath the warehouse's dull exterior, a supercooled morgue held fourteen alien bodies—including two from Roswell, New Mexico—that had been brought here in the fall of 1947 and had remained here ever since. The bodies were kept at near absolute zero, and were tended remotely by technicians who had no idea what they were keeping cold. Their training informed them that this was a storage area for unstable chemicals, and that if they failed in their duty, a massive explosion could result.

The building also contained a furnace designed to burn “special materials” at extremely high temperatures. Contrary to popular opinion, classified papers were not burned, but reduced to pulp and recycled. Still, the presence of the burn facility meant there would be plenty of normal traffic, and lots of ordinary material like classified electronics. This would be mixed with any ash that might contain evidence, such as bits of the alien bodies Flynn was about to consign to the flames.

He pulled the front of the car up to a tall corrugated metal door, then went to the identification pad and punched in his code. A moment later, the door began to clatter up on its chains.

He backed up to the furnace and waited in the car while airmen put up screens around the vehicle. As soon as he had slid his card through the pad, the facility manager was automatically informed of the security level he required.

Finally, hidden behind seven-foot-tall flats covered with gray canvas, he got out and went to the intercom. He picked up the handset and asked, “Is it up to temp?”

The answer was immediate. “Yes, sir.”

Flynn never took chances. “Are all personnel accounted for?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The entire floor is clear at this time?”

“Sir, there's a work crew repairing the exhaust fan housing on one of the ventilator systems.”

“Pull them.”

“Yes, sir. Give me a minute, sir.”

While Flynn was waiting, he went to the furnace and tested the mechanism. An interlock prevented direct contact with the interior. Heat like that would incinerate you in an instant.

The intercom buzzed.

“Yes?”

“The facility is clear. No eyes on your position.”

He replaced the receiver and pressed the ready button on the furnace housing. A green light appeared on the black surface of the control panel, and the door slid open. Despite the thickness of the interlock, the heat was so intense that the interior shimmered with it.

Flynn opened his jacket, lifted his pistol to a looser position in his holster, then walked to the back of the car. He unlocked the trunk and pulled it open.

The three bags lay just as he had left them. When he put them in, he'd noted their positions carefully. Also carefully, he touched the nearest of them. No responding movement. He touched the one behind it. Nothing. He reached deeper into the trunk and touched the third bag. Again, nothing inside reacted.

He lifted the first bag out of the trunk. The aliens were light, weighing only ten or twelve pounds. Careful not to let any claws cut through and scratch him, he carried the bag to the furnace and laid it in the open receptacle. Immediately, it began to smoke. He pressed the red activation button and the door closed. He repeated the process with the second bag.

As he turned back toward the car, he heard a loud click overhead. Angry, thinking that some airman was still working up there, he looked up. He saw only the shadowy girders. An instant later, though, when he directed his gaze back to the trunk, he saw that the last bag had been torn open and was now empty.

He stepped quickly back to the intercom. “This is on lockdown. I want the entire facility evacuated at once. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” He could hear the question in the voice. He didn't care.

A red light began circulating overhead and a Klaxon sounded. He drew aside one of the screens and stepped into the center of the large open space.

Methodically, he scanned the floor. Empty. So the thing had jumped into the girders.

Now there came another sound—the echoing creak of hinges.

Flynn turned toward it, and was horrified to see an airman enter through a side door and begin walking toward him.

“Get out of here!”

“Sir?”

“Out! Now!”

The airman stopped. His smile froze.

“Move!”

From overhead, there came a flutter. Flynn looked up. The airman kept smiling.

A figure dropped down, looking for all the world like a dark gigantic demon sliding down an invisible wall.

Then it stood before the young man, five narrow feet of spindly arms and legs to the airman's solid six-foot bulk.

The next instant, the creature leaped back into the rafters.

The airman had entirely changed. His uniform was gone, nothing left of it but shreds on the floor. Blood gushed out of his eye sockets and from the hole where his mouth and tongue had been. It went sluicing down his legs, pumping from the crater that was all that was left of his genitals. From overhead, there came a whirring sound, a noise of bees or busy flies.

As Flynn watched, the streams of blood stopped. They hung, frozen like candle wax, then, slowly at first, changed direction. They began to travel upward, racing across the man's body as he crumpled to his knees. An orb of blood, dark red, hung in the air six feet above where he had stood.

As Flynn was drawing his gun, the creature dropped back down.

It connected with the vibrating mass of blood.

There was a blur and a high crackling sound like something being dipped in hot grease. The bubble of blood disappeared into a new form entirely, and what landed with a light step on the room's floor was not an alien. Neither was it a human being, not quite. It was covered with pink gel, like something that had come out of a chrysalis or burst from some malignant egg. The eyes opened. They were sky blue, set in a blurred but unmistakably human face.

As he watched, another version of the airman took shape before him.

The boy's smile returned. As if surprised, he blinked his eyes.

It was astonishing, but Flynn was not deceived. This was not a hallucination, and it was not the airman. It made an impossible leap back into the rafters. Flynn fired at it, but no blood returned.

He began hunting the thing, but the room was complex with shadows, the ceiling fifty feet overhead, and he soon recognized that the thing could hide up there for hours. So he decided to try another strategy.

He walked out into the middle of the space. Holding his pistol, he looked around the room. Then he took out his small LED flashlight and shone it into the rafters. Three girders down, a slight thickening of the shadow along its upper surface.

His target.

“Shit,” he said into the room's echo. He holstered his gun and walked directly under the creature. Hands on hips, he shone his light into a dark area under the stairs that led down from the office level at the far end of the room, the same stairs the airman had come down.

Above him, he heard the slightest sound, a bare whisper.

He drew and fired into the biorobot as it dropped down on him.

The bullets blew its guts out, and it fell at his feet with a nasty splat.

He looked down at it, then at the actual remains of the boy—a husk, his youth destroyed in an instant—his promise and the hopes of those who loved him, all gone. He choked back his heart and his hate, and the anger that gnawed his core—if only he'd been quicker to see him coming, faster to react, this poor kid would still have his life.

Teeth bared, he sucked the blood-reeking air and, with it, sucked deep into himself the sorrow and the shame of his failure. He kicked the hell out of the dead alien, its incredible disguise already fading and melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.

He turned away from the mess and, walking with the excessive care of a man confronting the gallows, crossed the echoing concrete chamber to the black intercom hanging on the wall.

“Yes, sir, do you need assistance?”

He said, “There's been an accident. You are to seal the building. I repeat, seal it. It is to be guarded. A team will be here tomorrow to restore it.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“There is a man down.”

“Sir?”

“I repeat, there is a man down. He is dead. Our team will inform the authorities here of his identity after their inspection is complete.”

“One of my men is in there?”

“There was a man here. I don't know why and it's not my issue. He is dead.”

“He got shot?”

“No, sir. He was killed in another manner. He died in the line of duty.”

Flynn replaced the receiver in its cradle. As he walked away, the intercom began ringing and kept ringing. He did not turn back.

How in hell had this happened? Somehow, the thing had survived. What had enabled it to do that was yet another question that could not be answered. The purpose was clear: he had observed the predator in the process of camouflaging itself as its prey, like an Indian covering himself with a buffalo hide in order to get close to a herd.